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The Modern Language Association changed its bylaws to make advocacy part of the job description for delegate assembly members. Delegates approved the changes by a margin of 9 to 1 during the association’s annual meeting Saturday. The vote followed a virtual discussion among delegates about what institutions are doing right in terms of supporting faculty members during the pandemic and what the MLA might do to further support its members. Several commenters said that institutional responses to the pandemic have only underscored the precarity of non-tenure-track instructors, and that colleges and universities seem more open than ever about their desire to convert tenure-track jobs to less secure, non-tenure-track ones.
Paula Krebs, the MLA’s executive director, said after the meeting that higher education’s “most vulnerable employees during this pandemic are part-time employees, both faculty and staff. Employees without health-care benefits are of course in more danger than anyone else.” The MLA’s Executive Council is therefore hoping that delegates’ new advocacy function will give them “opportunities to use MLA resources to make some change at their own institutions and in their regions.” The council hopes to keep delegates engaged with the association year-round, making them aware of MLA policies and recommendations “that could make a difference on their own campuses,” Krebs said, such as the MLA’s Guidelines for Search Committees and Job Seekers or the council's recent Statement on COVID-19 and Academic Labor and its update.
Delegates’ new advocacy role, which is being referred to a “network,” is voluntary, for now. Christopher Newfield, professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the new advocacy network will improve MLA member services, MLA knowledge of campus issues and conditions, and on-the-ground campus knowledge of MLA standards, resources, recommendations and reports. “There are lots of [MLA] reports, on topics like ethical treatment of graduate students and overuse of non-tenure-track faculty, that could be used to improve standards in the country’s struggling colleges and universities,” Newfield said. “A benefit to higher ed would be colleges more likely to respond to the educational goals of their faculty than simply to budget pressures.”
Delegate Lee Skallerup Bessette, a learning design specialist at Georgetown University (and an Inside Higher Ed blog contributor), said the MLA’s increased advocacy on contingent faculty issues is a “welcome shift, and an embrace of what the MLA always could have been. I just hope it’s not too late.”
The MLA awarded more than $100,000 in emergency grants to contingent and unemployed faculty members without health insurance during COVID-19.
